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The mantra for your fantasy baseball draft later this week is two words: Tuffy Rhodes.
Rhodes, the Opening Day center fielder for the Chicago Cubs in 1994, was widely expected to fetch a couple of bucks -- tops -- in our auction later that same week, and only then by someone willing to gamble on the young hitter's faint hint of speed. When Tuffy started his season by popping three taters from the leadoff spot in his first game ... well, let's just say some planets went out of alignment. He fetched $32 in our draft and, by managing only five more long balls the rest of the way, doomed his owner to the depths of the second division.
The lesson? Don't let the first box scores of the season cloud your carefully-crafted assessments of who can help your team, by how much, and what they might be worth. This is the cardinal rule for fantasy baseball leagues holding their drafts or auctions on the first weekend after Opening Day.
It's not the only point to keep in mind on the most important day of your year, however. D-Day is fraught with minefields of all sorts and sizes, and while many are explosive enough to cripple your squad at a glance, most of them are also avoidable. Here are five simple rules to guide you past the most common trouble spots:
Trust Your Judgment
See Tuffy Rhodes, above. After you've spent most of the winter and all of spring training compiling lists, comparing players, preparing shopping lists and budgets ... after all that, does it really make sense to toss out your conclusions because ... because ... because Billy Bob Simple went three for four on Opening Day against a career slop-balling soft-tosser you've never heard of before, either?
Of course not. Trust the decisions and assessments you made before the season started.
Buy The Talent, Not The Price Tag
Once your auction starts, it does not matter a whit whether A-Rod is rated at $44 or $54. A player is worth whatever someone else is willing to pay for him, and everything else is pure smoke and mirrors. Your sole focus should always be on the amount of money available for the degree and level of talent remaining in the pool at any given time. Projected dollar values are most useful not for setting the price you should pay for any one player, but for determining the difference in worth between any two players at the same position or in the same general realm of usefulness of productivity. Buy the talent, period.
Buy Full-Time Talent
Do not -- repeat, DO NOT -- start messing with part-time, maybe, coulda, woulda, shoulda or wanna-be talent until you have completely exhausted the pool of players who trot onto the field six days out of every seven. By the simple expedient of getting more at-bats, full-time players will produce more of the counters you need to win. Repeat after me: greater opportunity equates to more production. In the same vein, it's useful to remember that the worst player in the major leagues is more valuable to you than the best player in the minors.
Have A Fall-Back Position
Okay. It's the middle rounds. You missed the pitcher you really need, the catcher who can't miss, the first baseman who will haunt your team the rest of the season. You are, in a word, screwed. What now? You pull out the fallback plan you crafted on the back on an envelope on the way to the draft. Among the options available to you, three are worth noting. One, if your league allows mid-draft trades, consider swapping quality for quantity to spread talent across your roster, covering your holes. Two, forget your immediate needs and buy up as much of the best remaining talent as you can, regardless of position, with the intention of trading it for the players that will return you to contention. Three, if you're in a keeper league, consider sitting on your money to acquire a plethora of cheap next-year talent to trade mid-season for help this year
Wear Something Fresh
You're in for a long day. Loose comfortable clothing is a must for marathons in close, smoky rooms brimming with the aroma of barley products, as seems to be the case (or should be, anyway) with most drafts. If you look good, you'll feel good, and your fellow owners in mixed leagues may actually appreciate you being easy on the eyes, especially towards the end of the day when the draft action can suddenly become "slower than the steam rising off a cowpie," to recall Denny McLain's memorable description of a competitor's fastball. And wear your sunglasses, even if you're indoors on an overcast day: what your eyes don't reveal could be the difference between first and fifth.
Happy drafting, cowboys.
Fantasy Baseball Index, April 7, 2001
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